Fighting for Study Time as a Field Engineer? ??
Civil Engineering Academy
Helping you on your journey to becoming a professional engineer and beyond.
When you’re a boots-on-the-ground engineer who’s out in the field quite often, studying for your exam is a huge challenge.
Long hours on-site, projects go off schedule, unexpected issues come up, and on and on.
When you know it, your hours have slipped away…and don’t get me started on the mental (and physical) exhaustion after such a hectic day at work. ??
Is there any way you can possibly make that work? ??
I’d like you to meet Alex Kuhn, PE .
He passed the PE Construction exam while managing a 750-foot tunneling project for the NYC Water Department (on-site!). ?? ??
His secrets and tips for other field engineers like you?
It's not about finding more time, but using your time a little bit differently than other civil engineers.
Stop Waiting for You to “Have Time” ?
Is there really a “perfect moment” in your life to take your exam? ??
The only answer to this question is no! Here’s what I mean. ??
Alex finally met all the criteria to sit for the exam back in 2017…but didn’t take it until 2021.
“I just kept on feeling like I didn't have time to study,” he said.
“My bosses would tell me, ‘if you wanna pass the exam, you need to study three hours a night for six months, plus eight hours on the weekends.’ I could never find that level of time.”
As someone who had been managing big projects on-site since back then in 2017, including two high-rises and a three-mile tunnel, that 'level of time' would never come around.
That’s what he realized firsthand, and you will too if you wait for the perfect moment.
Trust me…
So, you might as well do it. And do it now.
Do what you can, when you can, and how often you can.
You may not be able to follow our rule of thumb for how much prep you need …but that doesn’t mean you shouldn't prep at all. ?? ??
Do like Alex. He decided to commit to his preparation with whatever time he could muster.
How to Balance Field Work & Exam Prep ??
Now that you know you won’t have a “perfect time” to get started on this, how do you actually pull it off? ??
Here’s what Alex did that you can steal. ??
Think of it like a marathon. ??
You cannot simply decide to run a marathon, get out on the streets, and run…oh, 26.2 miles. ??
“Let's say I wanna do a bike ride. I can't just get on my bike and ride a hundred miles. But if I prepare and I practice beforehand, then I can,” Alex said.
So, as a field engineer whose hours can slip away, you have to start from the beginning — even if that means small, but consistent, efforts.
When he decided to take the plunge, he was looking around for some prep courses to help him out.
“I googled around and kind of just went with my gut on what seemed approachable to me,” he said. “And this is the one I went with.”
So he signed up for The Ultimate Civil PE Review Course and studied for three months, broken down like this to allow time for his busy work. ??
“The first month I studied two to three nights a week for an hour or two. And as soon as I felt tired, sleep was gonna help me more than another hour of studying.“
For his second month, he ramped up his study efforts a bit as he got used to it.
“Then the second month I was studying four to five nights a week,” he said.
Finally, for his last month prior to his exam date, that’s when he went all-in.
“The month before the exam, I was pretty deep in it by then. I was studying six nights a week, and bringing a pad of paper to work and just doing the questions without the study guide for an hour in the middle of the day.”
领英推荐
You don't have to be a study machine from day one.
Whether you study two hours after work or only one. Seven days a week or only two. Or even if you study on the weekends or you don’t…
It’s all about having a manageable schedule that fits into your life and work. ??
If you try to start by running 26.2 miles straight, you’re not going to make it. Same thing applies to your prep. ??
3 Hard-Earned Lessons You’ll Want to Steal ??
While Alex’s approach to managing his time was key to helping him balance work and studying, there are other study elements that made all the difference during the actual exam.
1. Focus on “Why,” Not “How”
When you’re studying and practicing problems, you simply read the problem, work it out, check if the answer is correct, and that’s it. Right?
Instead of trying to find out how to solve problems, you should also focus on why you solve particular problems in a particular way.
“I didn't want to just finish the problem,” Alex said. “I wanted to completely understand why that was the answer, what happened, you know? I wanted to know it so that when I came back to it, I would feel a little bit more comfortable.”
Developing a strong intuition for problem-solving and understanding what’s happening in the problem helps you get a good grasp of the core concepts you need.
This, in turn, can help you solve every other question on the exam. ??
2. Do the Easy Problems First
I harp on this all the time inside our review courses, but I’ll say it again…
Not all the exam questions are created equal.
Some are simpler and more straightforward than others. Some are more in-depth and require a lot of time.
Gosh, there are even some poorly-written problems the NCEES is still testing out that are gonna give you a hard time, and you should do the same thing to them as you do to the others. ??
You should focus on only the simpler and more straightforward ones first.
3. Trust Your Engineering Gut!
The PE exam has a reputation for being “tricky,” but in fact, it’s designed to test your engineering skills and knowledge, not to throw you off.
(We know this one is hard to stand for because it does include a lot of information that misleads us, but stay with me. ??)
After four years of school, passing the FE exam, and then getting two to four years of hands-on work experience in your field of engineering…
You’re a pretty capable civil engineer! ??
Whenever you’re in doubt about which answer may be correct, try to think of it as if it were an issue that came up at work for a project. How would you solve it?
Do like you do at work: try to give the best answer you can based on what you know about the problem and your work experience.
Are You Taking the Construction PE Exam, Too? ??
Alex’s journey to pass the most brutal PE exam while working on the job site of big, complex, and stressful projects is really a testament that you can do it, too!
If you want to make this less stressful on you (your work is stressful enough already ??) and save the limited time you already don’t have, just like Alex, here’s some good news. ??
Our Construction PE Review Course is launching towards the end of September/beginning of October! ??
The course is broken down into bite-sized modules and lessons to make it even more effective for you to spend your limited time and slowly build momentum….
…and that’s in addition to 190+ practice problems, a practice exam , a life-like CBT simulator , and more!
If you want, you can join our waitlist and be notified as soon as it goes live (with an exclusive disount code we'll have for waitlist members, too ??)
We'll be here to support you every step of the way in balancing your busy field work with your studies to get over this hump as fast as possible. ??
And don't forget to follow Civil Engineering Academy for more tips like this to crush our professional civil engineering exams!